When Windows encounters certain situations, it halts and the resulting diagnostic information is displayed in white text on a blue screen. The appearance of these errors is where the term "Blue Screen" or "Blue Screen of Death" (BSOD) has come from.

In a lot of instances, the screen only flashes up for a few seconds before re-booting. You can disable this process following the steps in Section 2below, allowing further analysis of the error.

Blue Screen errors occur when:

Windows detects an error it cannot recover from without losing data.

Windows detects that critical OS data has become corrupted.

Windows detects that hardware has failed in a non-recoverable fashion.

The text displayed can either be text based (Figure 1) or graphical based as in Windows 8 and 10 (Figure 2)